with what you had in your hands was simply

an ellipsis to emptiness. Hands can only carry
                very little weight.

and to have been caught in a virulent string
   of your Decembering noontime air – was it,

just birds spry and singing or was it
a wreathe of girls surrounding the *****

back to how it was to create light out
   of primitive engines?

once it capitalizes, we are caught in this
small circle. often retained, the detritus of

such duel: once ripples are May and
  initialed the reprise of springtime,

yet here we are only tropics, and cancer,
   and the heat is too much as to bear

charge, your tired, sleuthing dog Django.
   rasp for the lift, was it before the collapse

when both a yawn and a dance trembled
into   /stillness/

When it   is past 2 A.M. we have no use for reason.

       compose the current of the body and listen to its    brunt

when  to  be X-ed for  falling,    hide within  its sallow coordinate.

         gun   the  engine.     Let the  smoke  brag   about   our
  distance   suchlike a probative   burden.

away     from  here      is  the  loveliest   day

     it’s   definitive    to   quit   a resolution:

no    more   of   waste  /    shelter    may   mean   a  contrast between

     most   days  alone      and     some  days   with

     a   dignifying   versus    ---   when  it  is  finally   done,

       see me   through   a jaundiced   eye|

  a   hand     labored  from,  exhausted  and besieged|

         no   longer   someone’s    your   conflicting   a   possible

afterlife  this  one,   and  another one  ---   else between a rock   and
   a  place   leaden
          your      heart     downed   by   its   tending   to    prove

what    object   you    have    no    use  for.

    *you   like  the   sound   of  this,  don’t  you?

flayed shade      of peril

         i
           gaze
   into
          the
     sky
        be it night
or
      day,
          and look
   for something

      i know not,
even the moon
         and the sun
     are famished

     and
         that is
why i still
       keep
     on
            looking...

Amorphous, dove-form, on rink;
I was once as free as the wind,

and I consider the day’s unremitting reminder:
bent light – falling flat on my dull skin.

Wryly enough, the mornings are pried open,
remorselessly, like a note discovered obsolete in secret

gaps: why would such unopened unraveling
be secret? A persistent memory?

I gaze by the barricade, children fluttering
almost in flight at the city center’s space,

possibly conjuring themselves up as birds
or words freed – such scene requires several audiences,

whereas adjacently crooked, I stare inanimately,
which requires no spectator, possibly dreaming

a shadow, an old man wiping his reading glass clean,
or the squalor of the heart decanted in the heat of transitories;

acute on the night-watch, I will rejoin them
like old haunts finding new-fangled skin to scar.

exhaust of night's guttural snarl
  sleep, with its fixated eyes
  break the silence's dagguerotype.

edges of the moon fringe
  until its fingers sort out

      plenitudes of configuration:
  ignition upon contact,
      consummation upon acquiescence,
 pilgrimages within unmoving juxtapositions;
    suspended on intimation,
  void's hands swirl in depth
        lithe like a leaf, falling intimately on
    the ground:   my body's collapse
       to surrendering machination.
   it begins swollen to the full
         and ends, aching,
  yet unfazed by the untenable quicksilver
      of mind's pompous meander to a field
 where it so subtly blows,
              the wind in all spaces.

she says
i should neither touch her
light-plastered fringes
nor the sibilance
of eyes.

it would be unwise
while i am amidst
the storm of laughing
if you say
that my heart
does not shatter
in our despondence.

trilling in light
is the colloid of breath
foaming in the silence
shrapnels of this mellifluous
separation - we, flawed,
dawdling is this punctuation
of you and i
are no more

because you do not
gape with the voice
of sweetness like a cigarette
receiving the shadow
of my once dark being,
yet, someone within me
whose hands still carve
the figure reminds me
of
you.

the ides stupor
leaning into the wall of this
grave sunset.

give me once again
your voice
your shy voice
like a banca
waiting for the moon
to sink below
its dome.

give me once again
your *******
your lithe *******
like genuflected hills
waiting for the sun
to sink below
its dome

give me once again
your being
your agile being
like wild horses
running into the sun
striding into the moon
waiting for me to sink
below your dome.

i left the spigot dripping last night
and now the whole home is submerged —
archipelagic scraps of tatterdemalion
things line the floor like dead bodies
and poesy atrocities. but i have not
in mind, this disfiguring lament.

1     Take for example, a fine line
       darting towards your *******
2     And bend it towards the direction
       of genealogy or analogue fire
3     Henceforth commend contention
       and differentiate beyond hapless
       extensions of body to body
       mirror to mirror
4    Where all axioms define the universe
       and there is an epistemic
       afterthought looming past the
       arithmetic of things such is that
       of a steady punctuation mid-birth
5    Take the corporeal and eat Suns,
        thrash the Moon like how a bed
        is meant to be whacked by the
        spanked edge
6      Cold resuscitates flame and flares
        congeal all frigidity — or at least
        arbitrarily, remember it by whim
        caprice and then fade out
7      As misery clots in the same vein
        pulsing with different blood
        which we shall ensconce with
        laughter — a drunken hilarity
8      And then oppose the dictum
        that forced us to the point
        of recalcitrance, rousing hungered
        heat with memory of waking ice
9      Recount what I said about
        such opposites complementing
        each other in precise farce
10    In this exact exhibition faint
        upon recollections — going far
        inverse to poles only tells another
        distance covered by wide strides
        and a place nearly forgotten
        rekindled by newer ones.

Precision is everything. Bodies will be accounted
  with accuracy, one by one, and then all. Buried
  in the  chaîne opératoire.   Aplomb simmering
  in the sinews, cold as metal. Daylight will collect
  all that is disposed. Twilight will erase the monuments as cathedrals gorged, fat with prayer
   but before this, what impetus?

 Shot from the in-between, hip and pelvis.
     Surpass something from the peripheral:
 There are fugitives   conquering   secret places.
     Behind tense trees is the sought-for  enemy.
  Blinding light as   shot from  a hollow chamber
    the size of a dilated pupil: in a flash, 
             paraffin smearing   the  languid   visage.
   Hold   your   breath   and do   no harm
    to statistics.
               Nothing is  sure in   the   blotched minute.
    Stepping    on    bones    like  twigs,  names
        identical,   faces   disguised by    elements:    fire         as   sweat  and   blood.
         Air  pernicious   as   unheard   call for  mercy.
     This is   water:   the  one   who has  crossed
         the  river, close to   touching  the hand
      of   god.   Earth    a   trembling    grave.

      Words   roam as  should there  be  always
  in a  body, a  dazed  ornate  for a tractable  beast.
     You are here    for  passing. Prayer  is  intolerable,
    mind  the  sound  later  in newsprint. We  are
       the  same  muck   plastered   to stucco. It  rained
    ballistic  somewhere  between    the   sure-footed
         paper and   the   drawn line:

     They word it here as aletheia.
      The victims still unidentified.

In between,
     nonplussed   punctuations. Home  will  be  empty,
        if  not    for   candles. Carry   this   diadem
    across and    place  it  over the  helm of this
       broken   skull. Save   later   the  days for
     remember:  let  elegies perform nomenclature.

     Counterargument   was   day  if blinded
         by   intrusion. It has  happened,
    indelible.   Marked  by coordinates,  likened
    to   where  body parts  must be.  Unchallenged
       to  dismiss  the  derelict:  never to   return to
    geography.

          Dust on the ground.
          Rusted this  morning:  a bond broken into,
         the alloy  of an unknown   body
        breathing in the austere air of who   defied
            the incidental.
        It  will
     never     wear  off.    There
         is     only     reminder.

How i found you frozen in this city
but not desolate. You have everything
else tethered to a string -- pull, fathom, decree
    it yours. Say when to stop, but not falter.
Push yourself over the edge none to break
   the fall but you. When sensations reach
 for the viscera, choose not to break.
 Coagulate like shattered glass in the banquet,
 labor as it were forced by default. Resign
 under makeshift places we haven't slept yet. A couple

          of  accidents made of yourself, some familiar
 things brought over supper. Your father will smile
 at the completed sight of you. Your mother I saw
 picking fresh apples from the stand, your face
 this evening juxtaposed to the many lights of
 this city. Yourself would manifest a pavement,
        stretched like a corpse I sleep in the gutter.
From the city which I found you what else
      are we but to wane.
   We   curve    in   this   curve. Let me  finish
 bent   as  small as  a question  mark starting
 
   with   perhaps:  perhaps they meant it
       perhaps they  saw it  coming
   perhaps it   was  i not  you
            perhaps  it is  morning and  birds spry
    everywhere   speaking.  perhaps it was you outside the  rain   burning

                    ending, concatenative else it was
        merely I trying to explain   to  a  grievous fault.

our old appendages are our contemplation of our peripheries.

these minor playthings we do not touch
anymore. rusting alphabets moored
to the toppling refrigerator door. we have always been the curious kind;

before the sun sets, stills itself in unperturbed solace, we the lonely hunters of ourselves sift the word
and the ordeal: the last aureole perishes
  and here flowers the nightly pulchritude.
our age are servitudes circling around
  with elliptical utterances. we have no crutch but our brittle bones slowly chiming in the music of something we
avoid: only too well a mercy we cannot
  bequeath nor receive.

  so breakable and false, this what we
do, these that occur permitting desires
  to speak blandly of themselves.
the hazards of the existing numerals
   and their foreboding syntaxes:
how we burn bright and fade out,
   all of this briefly shattering
after a colossal fall – its trenchant elegy
   repudiates with contrapuntal music.
eyes, the contraband of visions and
   stifled breaths reared in capitulations
like tailgating a beast on the tractable road
     to snare it to its death, yet untold.

so many things wander
   in the night of the world - electric
  saw of the Hemiptera's wing uncertain
   of its path, or a hand like a beast
   in the ornate flesh, the sea of
undergarment with its saltine moistness,
limbless lips frittering onto squashed out
      softnesses that remember the fervor
  of grip or the pleasures of breathing after

     the tempest of beings,
   so many things in different placements
   displacing me here,
   savoring the impact just before the crunch of the bone,
   down to its last ache between the
    gnash of teeth and the miserly space
   of cerecloth to a body—

  they are many things trundling
   in the moment and i am just as much,
  yet a passing only, scouring the walls
   of graffiti emblazoning abstract unfathomably reachable and misunderstood, lost in ineffable translation — this doting darling
    contemplates death and
i understand now, going deeper
  as fish sinks into further blue,
wet with something else but water.

in some paradoxes, space happens when two people
               are close but not close enough.

after hours of demand, the presence occurs in many ways.
ubiquitous objects rend the veil of vicariousness.
             there will be a repetition of days in here,
an assertive swing of dialogues to make ends appear as though
    real and accurate.

in a brief candleflame of silence on a Vietnamese restaurant’s rooftop,
    there will be noxious space conscious of: we are waning.
the way words leap from fences of teeth and venetian hairs.
        air becomes a fat mound of fools in arcades and then in an instant,
  it feels as if there is no more space left to move in, so they wear
     each other’s skin and shed right after the ballast’s fall.

   when done explaining a dream, sleep goes to belabor a bell.
soundless beside them, stiff as a body dreaming for itself.
   in some paradoxes, what is imagined is most real.
  there is suspicion that this lacks sentimentality. it is as carnal
and as commonplace as a hint of touch from a closed-in expanse.

  that time at the market when you had your hands fretting
for shapes of perfect fruits, taking them in your careful hands
wary enough to not beat them senselessly to the pulp of their
   glazed figures – the prices start to inflate and you wonder why
  people still remained when at the first sign of difficulty
       you   start   your   furlough.

     and also sauntering with maimed pace, that of autumn’s slow
reprieve, making your way past decrepit buildings,
   you stop to take sunsets not because they’re marvelous,
   but because you easily forget – and accept that there are
   also    things  wet under   the rain  and not with tears.

when in another paradox, things point to their source
when doused with oblivion – starting to breathe on its own,
occupying space
          leafing through days when   something instantly said
    rushes back   searching   for   its  holder,
              to  be   given,   stolen,   or say,
                                     left   to  die   on its   own –

everyone else sleeps while this weather
takes a peculiar turn,

decides to chronicle with a mild kiss
of drizzle on the loam.

you did not know the name for
the mortal perfume of the Earth in the heat

of contrary figures but knew the nascent lunacy
of things and the dangers of their pursuit.

the gripping contravention holding things together,
a piece of the sun against the urban sky

and your apparition splayed as cold silhouette,
forced libation of Earth to soothe its machine,

sharp impressions accurate with details,
disseminate through the static conveyor of messages

the intact hieroglyph of your movement
in this odd weather.

we have fallen right
through the hurl
of this inner breaking.

    it is like we have collapsed
    into a twine of hands -
    spoken before the flowering
    of the twilight.
    we have awakened before
    the petalled corolla of the
    moon yields the peril of
    this void's statelessness.

in your eyes,
  so much in you is stellar.
  a florilegia of waxing images
   burning at the tip of this
    lunar flare, derailed from
   their orbits and left trundling
     in the vacuity.
in your eyes are the moon
   and the sun, the twist in
their shared iridescence,
   birthing out all your stars.

if love's the gaze of stone and hate
       the water drifting hands to their
   undreams of dreams, then it shall be
     with the zither of leaves a quartet of wind
        sifts inanimately so as dark as the night
    they will not dare speak the ineffable.

  if love's touch homing back to cities as
     spry as an unwound, delicate moon as
        can be, these flowerings drone
           exactitudes the rambunctious plunge
    of the roots to the Earth

                  and i will sing these delightful bursts called    days in 
    April have not the touch of frolicking birds
  and the quibble  of the masses half-opening
        and ultimately quivering are the mountains and the fish dance in the tumult
      of their aqueous variations

       it    is   April,  sing gently, as now all the
    leaves have fingers and  the ferruginous  rivers    have   feet   and   my love
            a   flower at   last!

next onset of such peril,
   be much the silent as though concentration
   of stone – have your say, yet the susurrus
   wills your anchored voice.

finer: knowable as a book is opened and a leaf
          is turned, a star: to exact how it is to float
   deep in the celestial of your body’s ample universe,
    and take the milk of the nebula,
      for mine to drink in this silence whose dress
is white and not   blue, or anything the coruscation sings
   hewn tenderly, swelling in the wandering of words:
   whose ambitions are no less than the swell sheen
    of the borrowed moon, and greater it is than
   it shall be the only thing timid like light underneath
     the fleeting of the shade that has been stripped and
  coursed you on, naked:

  yet my hands bequeath you enough the shade,
and slowly in you persists the evening
  full not of stars that lowered themselves to
    the penetralium but of all time has erected the
day,  the twilight  and your obvious darkness.

feet–dance–bounty–when–it–is
your–engine–that–sings–nondescript
music–shadows–left–wrung–out–of
drunk–in–dense–marshes–of–life;
your–gyrations–foretell–my–weight
as–in–the–home–of–verses—
strophe–by–strophe–endless–is–its
undulation–stamping—imaginations
two–fold–in–flounder—

it—is–like–you–are–deep–in–the–grass
and–the–wind–slurs–summer's–penitence.
    with–your–eyes–purely–the–tenseness
  of–days–like–dance–and–stillness
     meeting–at–the–edge–of–silence.

Heed tetchy static, roving around McArthur.
I can feel the steady impulse breed flaxen flumine.
   Songs tumble notes as ladies sing blunt-mouthed tune.
You croon with them, mindless of the force that tries
  to break free past the console. Your voice is analogous
     to reticence. I hear nothing, feel everything underneath the lazy glow
of the sign that says Yield plastered to a decrepit signage past the
        posh city buoys of Jupiter. Everything comes to a halt
in the remote red light district. Somewhere behind those thick walls
   that enshroud the fumes of tantric body heat, I can feel the ground
    stop in that disconsolate delineation: morose and encumbered,
    outnumbered by the cognoscenti that filled the streets unwilling
  to give us directions to whereabouts we rarely have knowledge of.
   cigarettes rammed deep within their mouths, masticating the cloud
     of nicotine as though it were tender meat, I hear the radio go
      ballistic past the sign now that reads Exit.

in that lightening moment I was stricken
   with a memory – quickening, swiftly, and then
deliberately: a bamboo in waiting yet akimbo,
    a sea unfazed yet stirring internally,
taking in the morning’s tremendous yawn
staring visibly, a thin line dividing soul and body,
    ephemeral and perpetual, vivid recall
and faint oblivion;

was it the wind that she borrowed with her
   presence or was it the breath that once stilled spring
like an invisible, yet felt river in my blood?
what impeccable maquillage was it that she donned,
      dawn or twilight?
something the silence waits with its mount on the boughs,
  the munificence of such plural modesty,
or everything the noise tell me which isn’t exactly
   but still is, a memory.

there is a way to part from
                   what separates us | converse issued
  by this curious distance |  toying with the
           proposition at sundown |  where to go
    when  you are home |  look at me across
          the eye and  see  copies

              true  breaking  in mirrors between
    shards  graphed  and  measured   go
           through me  you say  where   are  we  now
     that  we  have  gone?

        i  am  all  your   textures   shuffled  by
        hand    all  your  susurrus  folded   slid
        underneath    my   tongue   --  messages
        through a fusuma of teeth  piercing  air:
        breath mine to your  own mine  still  past
       clouds   in   dizzy   formations   head   northwest
        where  you belong, i sleuth  but  not demand
        an  opposite  of   presence, much palaver
       when it is thrown out in the  open  bare as
        a  shaved  beast
 
       how  does  a memory   walk   in  stilts
              past  cities   dreaming  impish
        with   a    proposal

      let      us      flee --

they took you now, contraptions no longer. there is a palpable quiet

      in the home. o lattice,
o vase of concrete, o smolder of onion
and the grave death of sugar;

the splintered staircase creaks
on no footwork and to go back to
cerements of this ceremonious banishment of shadow peals through
  gates opening to blue depths.

tonight, the room is as haunting
as old pangs. gnash the light of
moon past mud and linoleumed floor.
cross out my eyes and empty the
visage of their macabre.

   going back to tractable beginnings
as the bell tolls for no one:

  i stagger and startle the cornerless
  shadow, waking the orchestra of
  dogs to fracture the stillness

  like how drunken men curse at
  wives and throw vases against
  roses tossed to the dead.

  flesh warms no longer.
  garlands overwrought
  with serpents.

  glimmers of stone as dead
  as petrified oak.

  streets begin to narrow
  as light starts to pass on
  as answers.
  we make no sound.

"No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt." - hunter thompson

but it did, Hunter.

and the silence grows fuller
like a plane to Nicaragua,
  or the sudden surge of quiet
   after two bodies have already
     fallen from the vertigo
      of pleasure.

   treading the barbed line of
    living as the wind acrobats
    and mangles itself into
     a dagger - a sharpest edge
     of memory's telling:
  
     i am endlessly searching
     for something i cannot name.

     scouring for lost things
     in the pocket of this
     realm. tentativeness
    a tenfold - sink or swim.
     mind dwindles somewhere caught
  like a flailing fly in the lair
    of a relentless tarantula.

furiously this night grows
    insectile in its habiliment,
  buzzing and drilling against the
   walls pounding on them like
a man would, angered and hostile
   behind narrowing faces of wall
    in steep confinement.

tiptoeing
     through shards
        fire
            song
              light
        ­         no light
                   silence.

this won't hurt
under secret strobe and
cigarette haze
this won't hurt
underneath the parasol of
influence as the cosmos rains
weighing down eyelids close to
pavement
this won't hurt
this won't hurt
won't hurt this,

won't this hurt

is this vacated cocoon
 a concatenation of a gradual
    obsolescence of a distinct
      machinery

    when it lulls me to sleep
 so obscured

   grip like vise, then lift as if
 passing a levitation
 
            submerges something
  in the throat
       rammed like inward canopy
   of hand, links like leaves and leaves like
       leaves still.

   paying hindrance to stasis
convolutes a mirror to steel and mangles
       the bile

    not minding me when i fall
asleep to its last, faint recall.

this deep devotion in abstract tends to break loose
  reclining in air.
it may be even that the face is water
  and the eyes, basins. should the heart endure dank
seasons, there will be new skin thereafter.
the favorable light sways outside the house,
  stilled settings of rife adjustments, the objects are in
study: the fluent is stone. the trees automaton.
     demand for sought after thrills, the plenary hall
of moon. wider than any light, drunkenly, frothing by
  the gutter of this body.

sometimes when solemnity incises
   there is image of death in mirrors. yours is diffident
surrender over the haze of hastily contending moments
  and such truth is that the escape is yearned for
by a body – stiffening to become so rigorously false.

listening to the infinitesimal sound of body
   take this music to the trees, their lignified arms akimbo
yellowing, grandiloquent from the seizure of old fevers,

    the maddened, thorough tune mistakes your
    anatomy as cartography. if your deepening, secret parts
   are known, we will assume all conditions
and give variables for metaphors.    Sometimes escape is coveted
by    the   body, its indistinct signs neglected as beacons,
   there are   other  things happening, say, a hand meeting a face,
or the feet converging in trembling altitudes. A limit is set here.

speak, also you—
the night is cut
and the moon is beheaded;

a mound of silence
collapses,
outlasting the lucid hymnal.
the clinking of glasses,
the guffaw of the gull trilling
  on no cypress.

god has meant locks
   and keys.

chiaroscuro is the form
   of oblivion, river is the voice
   of the dead: the throb of lure-call
  poised at the hollow of the hand,
    this evening.

there is a sadness that is drunk
   with something a lasting recall
   wuthers without a name:
the wayward moon hangs,
  the guillotine of stars
     spreads black blood on the tulip,

drinking as if there is no water,
    only that of wine and something
   that has brought us together,
     separated in the evening

our life, pithless against the wall,
     engraved there, unnavigable writ:
      sundered, washed ashore.

paint me this picture, sonorous color
clutching the quiet ****

             pressed against cloying scenes,
        a loose hand bannering a bayonet.

rivet me waters, and much of the Earth
tightly groping inlands,

                thatched in the branch nowhere alone,
                is the song of God lullabying cities.

again the whole sky with its keen eyes
manifests a gleam worth knowing a cherub,

                 and sooner than it is later, when the seasons
    postpone their flamboyances, chiaroscuros of smoke,
   deceit, uncared for and unheard shrieks bounce off careless corners
    and the song of God is but static with little wings clipped
    and tossed into vicissitude:

song   or    no   song
bearing a fruition of attrition:

                    resounding far-away:  a comatose  of cars,
             a scuffle of powerlines, a melee of battlement and tranquil

continually     fluster the  child
   in  metronomic dance.

he wipes his glass clean
she wipes his glass clean
his  glass   hers
  to see    in
       the fold of   her   being
she   sees   to it  all clearing;

  and things to fulmination
committing a steady ******   into
   the   silence, this   afternoon

I think to   myself

   wardrobes  tossed
hers,      somewhere there,   in oblivion
    temporary,   absolute,
  zeroed in, sexed up against   walled-up contention

  our  legs  a tribe
of   hounds,   our   fingers
     feathering  light    through   his   glass
  she    wiped   clean
     with       her      emissions
                           eyes    wide   as morning

somewhere by a mountainside,    horses
   ride   into    the Sun
and he   thinks    of  
      repetitive  lapping    of   floundered  waves
to    bite shore
   and she   thinks   herself

           a    verse     punctuated
open    still
           to  
                        revisions

"when you cannot sleep at night,
you are in someone else's dream"

how many hours shall descend
bringing in a cavalcade
of dim twilight's press
  on the soft, aqueous levitation of body?
is this liminality's gradual
hand nailing me
into flesh and stirring
me out of this oceanic crawl
when all you have ever
done was sleep me away
and tell me
of these
susurrations of soul?

i have no answer to
this solitary condition -
say, taking you by the hand
and somnambule in cosmic field
of no thought's ethereal working,
or as in playthings are freely
laughing behind whose hair
flails without a face, i wonder
which beauty holds true,
my wide wakefulness,
like the only key pursuant
to its inimitable hole.

i am infinite in someone's
thinking, who dare not
say something,
who daunts back to breathless
consoles, and springs back
dizzy with a gyro of questions,
  i am all hunted answers but
  where
  is the votive voice
  that searches me?

a finagling
       conception

faces start to blur
past dreary old Manila
and scaffolds cool to touch
like one of the many daggers
of love struck relentlessly
against the rib
mercilessly genuflect
as the rain mocks
the tears of a woman used bone-deep
wolfing down at the door
heeding these transcendental howls

baleful eyes ****
past the throb of the strobe

remain wordless

i taste it in the moment
yet why kneel?

her hand will be moonlight
by him: quietly

have we become beautiful
sound? movement of dancers

and fangs of music— birds
stirring elsewhere,

abandoning trees, you
and trilling waywardly across sound, me

all is disquiet in days your lips
have sung honeyed softness

i could hear it like a flower
whose petals are blue

deepening in silence.
her smile will be harlequinade

by him and an adagio of scherzo
by her will make feet trample

the accident of water: pond-strove
of love's bend asks

have we become rivers
leaping in temporal splendors

as when it will never
give sleep its ****** whiteness again

i sing through morning's trek
and we, deeper then rain-washed stone,

will be all but moon and dark,
oh, you, me — unclosed without protest

pressed against the wall
of love's domain.

I'll peer through the flaxen strand
   of night

with your color that excites,

and think myself the blue pither of fire
  or a flummoxed stone left unturned.

it's not the rapture of a knowledgeable
   beast or the common grip
   of the eye's gift for unsparing detail.

it's the way the queen moves to all
    corners unclenching a fold of sidereal,

and then like a child with almond eyes
  spruced up, spritzed this morning's
  incandescent dye,

the lapping of strange tides revealing
    fish with dreams of brine

or that one moment when you had
   at first light, the hot flush of coming
      into, recognizing insatiable appetite,

  whistling its overdue intent and the detritus
        we try to hide when we had that virginal moment of    once and  never looking back
      at mirrors.

o, life — you summon the compunction of
   our beforeness.

with your hands, you have worn me
  like a glove, tending to your footfall
  of soil.

with your voice, you poise the starkness
  of this bleak leviathan airlessness.
rousing the frogs sleeping in their
  fortresses — i give them no unction.

it is because life
        is a shard of glass surreptitiously
flattened out, shifting its balance,
   an obscure triangle. because life
is a rose of the old and my hands, a curious spry — i know not its thorns,
   only the dew that melds to dry.
because life has left me a youngling so old, groping in the beholden dark.

i recover no wholeness, and as i sit
in the middle of cobblestones,
the moon whetted to an inverse dagger,
  the blue of the sky like a cathedral
in twilight has its tremendous secrets
  revealed by lunar markings.

this is the voyage of the derelict;
scraps of paper twirling, blown by wind
from stars, the sodden aroma of the seaside — life, you are a sea and the waves unnerve the true blood of subterraneans.

darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
             i have not a wreathe on my dome
             i have a long measure of water
             rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
             your body’s canopy in the stream of me
             i chase the silence like a tractable beast
             in this hollow den of nothing
                                                         darling
i have not hands but chains
      i have volcanoes and not moons
         i see past the banners,   an army of   light
       unfastening itself  from  the poles of foreverness
     I have in my eyes   again the frail azure
            and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
         to    figures,   assumptions,    colloid
          endless   snow,     frayed beings moseying towards
                     rows     of   lengths and   the autumnal abode  of  hills
   turning     green,    brimming with    the ***   of pastures,

      feasting in this fill of such   heaviness,   a name    of what I cannot   recall
         darling   the yellowbell       darling   the lignified    amaranth
               darling      here   at   such   meeting    I    am  starved
         with    little    movements     of   flesh

i.
on such frigid atmosphere lay,
a serene fugitive.

do not look at me with such lithe eyes:
the sepulcher is only starting
       to begin.

your sleep's regimen twice-folds
origamied on the quiet cloister,
hang there, puts to test the unblinking
certainty of we who bear no retrieval.

ii.
remember when
    all the fish you gut and all the *****
      you cleave were all but meaningless
       fill?

a mutiny of stench is released,
as men continually purged you of
your poisons — us mortised to this
vague mandate.

i have wished for them to miss the mark.
i have longed for them to mime only
  but your placid face.
they have ransacked the quarry of flesh
  flashed bare against mirrors riveted
   to split-seconds of hours.

iii.
when i was young,
much sleep was needed — a noonday travail to all fretting but a dream of dogs.

now this thump of quietness
may mean no recovery.
the speculations to gnaw for sleep are
lost in a blink of an eye:

the blanket that once smelt of camphor
now engulfs in a single blast of cerement.
        — this scrap of a thing that we
             almost have no use for.

iv.
a furious consideration of roomfuls
   disallowed by a heady ruling of
   emotion's precision.

that, of the most difficult choices—
knowing where to fecundate rest.
your body heeds
            no metaphysical reckoning.
  the preordained space for you to occupy, this unwanted silence that keeps
   on renaming things we cease to forget.
a sentence seized by a clause of wood.

  all too soon to wave as a single beat
  is thrown a hundred ripples into my
  eyes, dragged along and trundling there,
     left lengthening to leave, never to wait.

not with time, nor with a touch we choose
to contest — but an eyeing space,
   a moment to attract transience.

v.
i will only look at you once — lacquered
   with solace.

no ellipsis of breath could continue you.
no paragraphs would forgo of your
   punctuations. i deny my defeat
against one who brooks with victory.

    no hint of other chroma.
    a chiaroscuro of beating petals,
   left only to thrive and not swing
    with verdurous display.

how to tell if this is true?
i touch myself as words gyrate
  in the room that received your body
  like the lighthouse that feeds the sea.

—  or maybe sheathed with the untruth.
  this enigma yields no revelations.
  too late to ring yet still continuing on,
    an early drop of dew.

The immediacy of the ambulance turned speech into stone,
  and the gyratory red and blue which is still unknown to me
  grips with bewilderment.

Passing your decrepit home in Santolan. The slovenly lawn
that welcomes an oncoming figure, sometimes I.

The love will stay there,
deep into its sepulcher – fingers of grass sprawl in arbitraries;
answers unknown to ourselves, questions leaving
themselves carefully placed in irrefragable order,

the brooding future that strides a fugitive,
straining our place – the warmth of its absence
oblivious to us like a pretend fireside casting shadows, aslant,
on any figure trivial to us.

we begin to shiver in the blue of night, darkening around us.
the moss-grown silence securing its station somewhere unseen,
but felt,

like this individual morning.

(  to which temple shall our in-betweenness       kneel before

       reft in ****** dark?

   housed in parenthetical arms,
       graver than a tomb's rhetoric—

washed in red of flowers, a swarm
    of light arrives, waking the undeath
                                                      of stone.

  from glib strife to downpour of
    leaves — a morning unbound, unclose

the    sojourn     lay by the side of the
     river, the single-minded cruise


     to      appassionata,

                                       love.)

You’re well-received in the Sun, this extraordinary Wednesday with nothing
  to do but to look out the window in transit and feel the breeze
  when it happens, that it takes a sojourn also – imagine it into form of all things
  gone wrong when love took its place.
  a linkage of all misguided features and ghosts, some travesties along the way
but it is all good once you bet on horses in burning stables, each eventual fall
  of hand into another hand – you see his, and sense a potential glower into
  detail. The patter of rain when it falls hard, and taking into account bodies
   flaying in unrestricted pace, breaking – when the impossibility of an immovable object
   meets
                   an almost impenetrable force or reckoning and no distance or collision was met,
  only retch at the volatility of the variables we have no use for
     such as love.

Fallibly, this evening, the moon over movements
exposed to prying dimness.

Everything is resigned to silence. The balcony
peering through the vastness, the moon like a tonsure
of a septuagenarian paving a hole in the sky.

The Earth moves with feet: plantar, tiptoeing –
out of propulsion from underneath the ground,
turns to sway, a clenched league of roots

the dog outside fashioned to sleep, draped by
the curtains left to dry in the bleak behemoth.
a stone his own size, or the emptiness my own weight.

Here are misspent days under hermetic space.
I am a child left to my own salt. I lift sleep’s lids
and what dreams diminish in realness is nothing but a tide
that clings more to brine than my hands – leading me back to
where I have found myself verily this evening,

the old Moon repeating itself, unfinished still.

we lay silent on the floor like
leaves in June.
i held her arms like tightly-knit stars
in the loom of the sky.
the invisible hand of the moon
enters through the window quietly,
our breaths twining, slowly rising
like dust, lift altogether in the moonlight.

soon she will fall asleep and i too.
i hear a distant crooning in the night
as she careens, pulls the covers.
through intruder somnolence,
a gentle hand whirls as the winds
of many days banner our lives -
the leaves that we entirely are,
on the same bed's thorough agricultures,
were blown apart by the wind that
has brought us together,
now apart, whispering
good night.

entering the gradual hour,
this wraith without announcement,
without wreathe, without the
song of bells nor the fracas
of cathedrals.

are you always like this?
have you already deciphered
the enigma imbued on the twists
of our roads? have you already quieted the anthem of emptiness?

when silence befalls you, do you trill on the same bough after your tired flight? with what weight of water do you scrunch the already dampened foliage? outside windows and all openings there is only the old moon's wane, and in this uniform exactitude, do you speak what remains to be said? what are only these words that remain so small in us? why have we not foreseen their deaths?

why must you go in the irretrievable dark and emerge with
only scarce light? why must now your languid bones rattle underneath the ground of this formlessness and speak to me the languages i conceive on my own
and not from your once brazenness?

before your rigor was the sibilant stridence of your once wry smile.
we cannot find it in us anymore,
and somewhere yet again, inside of us, rallies still with its mayday and its warfare,
something only a shadow could
only ***** in the total dark.

1 “Pursue not with accolade in mind. The hand will remain blank, if not black – blacker at that notion of conflagration. There is a fine line between infinite and obsequiousness. It is all disappearance, isn’t it?” she humbly quipped sotto voce.

2 Whenever I look at a dog, I lose my metaphors. Say, when he gnaws a wall for no reason. Or when I watch the indefatigable motion of his tail. Is it all redundancy?

3 I’d like to think that I sold myself a long time ago, mistaken as hurling a stone into the deep setting of repugnant waters, my body assuming fragrance, or a fall of feather – half-mast at that, in conscious space.

4 I want myself bought back from the dark, oblivion, the constancy of salt in the sea.

5 I fear that when the Sun cleaves through hills, light would be but two bodies never finding each other.
   Depth is wedded to loss, cobwebbed into abeyance.

6 Who do you see when you see a shadow? A movement of identity? Or the identity of movement?
    And whose land does it continually mark with longing? Or an insistence of feeling? A dearth of space is made aware of its vastness. We must all hide in the night so as to minimize its feat.

7 Speak boldly about memory. Its incandescence, its liminal end. Its forgotten thresholds. How it felt at first light to grasp but not sense out ownership. Be silenced over entrails. I will sojourn into the infinite quiet of your throbbing presence and fade out, the same way you lilted away like a blather of a child in the heat of a haranguing mother, or the predictable yet sudden erasures of sea.

8 I have not, the discovery of landscapes. My next door neighbor’s home is being renovated. I have a fascination for unfinished structures.

9 I look at my image in the mirror: A scruple of metal-reticence. A mangle of scaffolds. I am a home that cannot be assuaged.

10  Disappearance.

in my heart's deserted street—

on the road and the cornucopia
of twists, and the unmindful turn:

surrounded by white-bellied,
inward-breaking, bright-***** creatures
as oblivion falls flat on the cage
rimmed with the glint of a scene's
surrounding peril.

what to make of it, now that i am alone?
the gladiolus is cut and my heart
sings winterward.

i can paint now with blood—
naked boys eaten by serpents,
a home fractured in the middle
of flightlessness. the sunlight,
the lie, the feigned sublimation of moon,
the audible death of star, felled on the floor, laughing, squirming insanely
on a waving line, water not warm enough
to bathe in, this serious multitudinously-blooded sea where i find
            
      nobody at all.
cutting the silence,
         bleeding the noise,
emptying the horizons,

     filling only the streets,
      


   but never myself.

gravitate in me
   ever so
    s    l     o    w       l        y
  and ineffablycontinuousforgetthehaltandpressonlikeahandtoapageturning­adayandforgettingthenight,

   a featherlight detritus,
       or matutinal climb vertical among
    hills, this is you in most fervent memory:

    snowing now endlessly,
     i slalom through the obstacles
       of you without no clear sight
         of tomorrow.

Thorns. It was all thorns, this thing of a hand, making its way,
swirling across the small of my back. We are here again. In this
working of the way, trying to make some sense out of our
elicited absurdity; Names. We are both made of them.
Some take a toll in our bodies and mostly turn themselves,
a parting wave, or a hinge that does not work – closes all stalls,
the thumping on the walls, and then some indifferent silence
penetrates the two of us: aberration. We are here again, trapped
inside this console. Our tabulated quotients do not rear the best
of our equations. Now there is distance in such short space that could
hold no less than a matchflame, or a little hummingbird, prying open,
the leaf that turns with us in the ground. The rapture of freedom
does not enclose me. Like a shuddering blade of grass bowing down
to the perpetrating rain, I am within arm’s reach with the stones that
refuse to give out answers. We have burned the bramble. Our buds,
of no use. The wind blows, and that is it. No solace. Taking time
to sojourn deep into something we both know as a standstill,
a petrified tree at the bend of the road, or this  undeniable thing
                  that asks for a different name: love,      something torn.

silence, an immense room
        then so suddenly obscene.

memory clings longer than imagined –
I say this in hours where I touch you
   not with hands, fret you not with fingers,
kiss you not with lips but with words prying open
with gestures which unwound us ever so softly,

I unsay your memory shorter than it was held
far beyond what spring embraces solemnly inward,
     that in light structure of night you will be wholly made

true in calmness what the tremors of my home
        unravel with little dints of December keen with
   its thrall,

touchingly you

      without a flounder of breath or an ounce of caress,
  are still written here, like the world answering
           for our questions –

the dharma
       burns
       in the bone -
       love is no synopsis
       to our caged delusions.
       death, why, only a dearth
       diorama of the
       incontrovertible
       denouement.
       the unsinkable truth
       so avidly assiduous
       that if dogma bleeds final,
       our beginnings stem only
       from the rose of
       ephemeral loves
       and in the end shall
       we meet god - only i,
       in the seethe of these
       phrases, have burnt
       wilder than any light.

without words
and their wondrous servitude,
i would only be
and cease to become.

as in a forest,
i shall then continue to flower
in the sharpness of swan-song.
like a beast dazed
into nothing and its bafflements,
even the triviality of a lone stone
shall vagabond through me
in a thousand days that pull
downward, refusing to reveal themselves and their paradisiacal nuances. their etymologies
star their deaths to a languid crawl towards an empty page.

all words trapped, slurring
in the radiant void, unbecoming of themselves and who i am.
if i am to be without poetry,
my then epiphanies would be scaled down to an epitaph's weight and its proper terrors;
   to think that i cannot write anymore, weave anymore these words,
    reeks of deathlessness, and i,
  communing through the myriad dailiness of things shall exist only to be,
   and not become  ( as a single star is meaningless in the coruscation of the multitude - a constellation without moniker,
  a god rid of sobriquet,
as a carpenter without tools,
   orr an army without arsenals)
i am things vaguely not.

god forbid, if i am to be
  without poetry,
what will i become, unknowing of
its grave rescue? these marvels
shoot off in the temporal flight
   of this splendid fate, and if without words, then this shall only be, still afloat, a wild, directionless flight.

Earth fosters all
    singing upstream
        the affect of
green — certain
    thingsthe
g
allan
Try
         moreover once
and folding the ineffablewater
    d
ownthe
            hill
the hands of the world
     fondling   t
he universe
      like a totterin
Ganimal
     doused in an amalgamof
     fire
   tucked in our laughter
       sweet summer
    surmise of all warmth

your home filled with vines does not know
it is alone — it seeks to become a diaphanous fold of trees, a violent vermilion of skies crushed to clay.

its arms hold refuge, a delicate heart.
the formless shadow there and the unguessed sensorium of furniture —
they do not know the touch of ruin.

underneath you, i am.
soil crumbled by the hundredfold of your
weight. in the air singes the burning of days, punching a hole onto me like
a globule of diminutive fire rife to
cull the vineyard of my body.

your home does not know
the dream of its weight. the anchor of its pillars gnash the acidulous trifle of hours.
doors, windows, cupboards still — every aperture gorges itself with the water
of your footsteps.

your home does not know
that it stomps stonily against an earthen fruitage: my body beaten to a pulp.